Posts from the ‘Diabetic Mommy’ Category

“I was low. I was frustrated because of the low blood sugar. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” and I can tell she means it by the look in her friendly, brown eyes.

I used to be very terrible at saying, “I’m sorry.” I would hold on to frustration and anger in a way that was not good for me or anyone around me, making a grudge or the need to feel like I “won” the disagreement take precedence over a relationship. I’d keep “I’m sorry” under my tongue because I didn’t want to admit that I’d done something that hurt someone’s feelings. I felt embarrassed to admit my shortcomings. It felt awkward and bad.

It took a long time for my head to figure out that my heart was better off if I let the sorry fly, but once I came to that realization, I tried to embrace as often as I could. (I also had to work on the “does this interaction make me better or worse as a person?” This is still a work in progress.) Now I’m less terrible at saying, “I’m sorry,” and I feel better for it.

As much as I hate to admit it, my blood sugars are not only influenced by my emotions (stress, anyone?) but they influence my emotions, as well. The way my numbers make me physically feel can cause me to act like a total crumb. It’s another reason to be aware of what my blood sugars are, and if I enter the Crumb Zone, apologize for it.

I find myself apologizing to my daughter at times for entirely blood sugar related reasons. Sometimes I snap because I’m taking yet another bolus to correct yet another high and my body is riddled with sugar and rage, and I will be far less than patient with my little one as a result. Other times I raise my voice because I’m trying to treat a low blood sugar reaction and she’s at my elbow asking to [insert rogue request from active 5 year old here]. Losing my patience during the course of run-of-the-mill parenting is something I am not proud of, but losing my patience because diabetes is leaning on my parenting style is something I want my kid to understand as best she can, because I don’t want her ever thinking my seemingly random outbursts are tied to her in any way.

It’s a weird balance between feeling like I’m blaming diabetes for my actions and simply explaining my actions. Am I in the Crumb Zone (or Mayor of Crumb City, if you’re nasty) because of diabetes? Nope. Diabetes doesn’t get credit or get blamed. But sometimes this disease is part of the explanation, and I want my family to have a sense for how, and why, I’m wired a certain way.

There are moments when Birdy assumes my attitude problem is diabetes-related when it’s not, and I’m forced to fess up.

“Are you in a bad mood because of a low blood sugar?” my daughter asks, pointedly.

“Not at the moment. Right now, I’m in a bad mood because I just realized I left a banana in the car while I was on my trip last week. And now I’m afraid to open the door and confront the banana stink.”

“It’s okay,” she says. And then adds, “Ew.”

Related posts:

I had just buckled the girls into their car seats and was ready to make the drive home from day camp, and as I turned the car on, I reflexively grabbed my Dexcom receiver to take a peek at my blood sugars before I started driving.

Shit. 68 mg/dL with an arrow straight down and a blood drop signaling a need for calibration.

“Hang on guys,” I said to my daughter and her friend, who were already singing camp songs in the backseat. “I need to wait a minute before we head out.” I pricked my finger quickly to check my blood sugar and, sure enough, saw the 63 mg/dL on my meter waving its arms at me. No worries – I always have a jar of Glucolift in my center console.

Except this time.

Shit.

“Hey girls. Do you guys have anything left in your lunches?”

“Yeah, I have strawberries and a pouch left in my lunch. Do you want it, Mom?” Birdy offered.

“Yep.” I climbed out of the car and went back to the trunk to rummage around through her lunch bag. Pulling out the snacks, I gobbled them while standing at the back of my car, a mom on a mission to bring her blood sugar up before driving.

We sat in the parking lot for ten minutes or so, and I watched the CGM graph arrow relax and point sideways. A glucose meter check showed me at 78 mg/dL, so I felt I was on the rise. We started the ride home.

Except the CGM alarm went off 15 minutes later, only this time it showed double-down arrows and the BELOW 55 mg/dL message on the screen.

“Shit.”

Certain parts of Rhode Island are relatively rural, and sometimes you have to drive for a while before you pass a gas station or a convenience store. I immediately started calculating when I’d pass the next place to stop. I also assessed my symptoms (none) and instinctively reached over to disconnect my insulin pump from my hip. I thought the two little kids in my car. I thought about where I could pull over. I worried about what was safer: driving for another minute or pulling over and not having any food in the car. And I hoped that worrying so intensely would make me feel stressed and hopefully jack my blood sugar up a little more.

But then, just ahead, I saw the familiar orange and brown sign of a Dunkin Donuts coffee shop.

“Yes.” I put on my blinker and pulled into the drive through lane of the coffee shop. “Girls, I need to stop here and get an orange juice, okay?”

“DOUGHNUTS!!!!!” they yelled in unison.

“Not this time, guys. I need to get some juice and wait a few more minutes before we can keep going.”

Minutes later, I was in the parking lot with an empty bottle of orange juice and two patient kids in the backseat of the car who were peppering me with questions about diabetes.

“Why did we have to stop?”

“Because I needed juice to treat a low blood sugar.”

“What’s a low blood sugar,” asked my daughter’s friend.

Birdy piped up. “It’s when you have diabetes and you have too much insulin or not enough food in your body and you need glucose tabs or juice or doughnuts but not today because these doughnuts have gluten in them.” (All in one breath.)

“No doughnuts?”

“Sorry, guys.”

“Can we drive soon?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, can we sing until we start driving?”

“Sure.”

We sat in the parking lot while I waited for the orange juice to do its thing, keeping an eye on my CGM graph and an ear on the two little kids in the back of my car who were belting out songs they learned at camp and who trusted me to take good care of myself in order to take good care of them.

Related posts:

The question was simple enough, but not even close to a level my hypoglycemia-addled brain could handle. I had trouble formulating a response, and the lag time was embarrassing. We’ve only moved to the neighborhood a few months ago and haven’t solidified relationships with our neighbors yet, so being wickedly low in front of someone new wasn’t my favorite way to disclose my diabetes.

Thankfully, a disclosure had already happened, to a certain extent. When she had asked me about my work travel this past week and what I did for work, I said that I worked in patient advocacy and that I’d had diabetes since I was a kid. She nodded in recognition and shared that her college roommate was also T1D, so my disclosure was pleasantly subtle and streamlined. No big deal. What I hadn’t anticipated was going low during the course of our conversation.

And I was low. Wickedly low. The kind of low that made my face feel like it was full of Novocaine and that my hands were like birds at my sides, twitching and flapping absently.

I scanned the trees in the front yard for some kind of hint.

“Pssssst. You guys! You, trees! Do I have fun plans for the summer? HELP!”

They only waved their leaves at me. “We have no idea! Go get something to eat, dummy!”

“We go to Maine. MAINE.” I said it twice with way too much emphasis on the second one, an angry seal barking out their summer plans. My neighbor didn’t seem to notice that my eyes weren’t able to focus on her, and I’m fairly certain she didn’t hear my Dexcom receiver hollering at me from the front steps of the house. But I knew that another minute or two was the chasm between attempted conversation and calling for medical help, so I had to embrace the awkward.

“I’m so sorry; I know I mentioned that I have diabetes and you said your college roommate also had diabetes. So I’m really, really low at the moment and I need to go inside to grab some juice. Would you excuse me for a minute?” I was trying to be polite and not let on that my thoughts were knocking around in my head like socks in a dryer. She nodded and I took off for the kitchen, where I downed a glass of grape juice as quickly as I could. My CGM only told me I was “LOW” and I cursed myself for not responding faster to the beeping.

Coming back outside, we stepped back into conversation without much pause, watching our kids play in the front yard.

“Sorry about that,” I said. “No problem at all,” she warmly responded, not missing a beat.

And I kept an eye on my CGM graph, watching my blood sugars rise and kindly deposit thoughts back into my head.

Related posts:

She shows up in the middle of the night sometimes, evicted from her warm bed down the hall due to a nightmare. “I had a dream about a blue monster with no arms and popcorn on his feet.” She’s clutching her blanket, her water, a flashlight, and a stuffed animal; clearly she’s in for the long haul.

I moved over in the bed and she started to climb in.

“Oh and mom? You’re low,” she said, handing me the vibrating pump.

The fog of feeling sleep lifted immediately and I recognized the symptoms of this hypo. Sweaty hairline, fumbling fingers, my sight reduced to a tunnel, and my hearing razor-sharp, hearing the shuffle of my daughter’s feet, the steady breathing of my sleeping husband, and – finally – the buzzing buzzery of my CGM alarm.

“Do you need something?” Chris asked from beside me.

“Yeah – can you grab one of those juice boxes from the shelf?”

Birdy was already snuggled in beside me, nestled close against my hypo-damp shoulder. A few seconds later, Chris returned with a juice box in hand.

Habit, habit, habit – I am a creature of it. When my blood sugar is low, I go through the motions to treat it, and if anything gaffs up the routine, I’m thrown. Lows in hotel rooms rock me because the bedside table is five inches farther from me than at home. When I am home, having the glucose tabs on the table itself instead of in the drawer can be enough to confuse me thoroughly. (Lows make me the least-sharp knife in the drawer.) In this case, I grabbed the juice box firmly and reflexively used my other hand to reach for the little plastic sleeve with the straw tucked inside. Only I grabbed it a little too firmly and juice shot out all over the bed, because my forward-thinking husband had already stuck the straw inside the foil hole.

“Shit …” My pillow was wet with juice. And so was my daughter, because I managed to (ocean?)-spray her in the face during this transaction. “I didn’t know the straw was already in there.”

“Do you need another juice box?”

“No, this should be okay. Only a little bit flew out.” I drank the rest of the juice box, per routine.

“MOM. This is not OKAY. I am all WET.” (Even at 3 am, my kid can be indignant.)

“Sorry, baby. You can go back to your own bed, if you want? That bed doesn’t have juice in it.”

She thought for a minute, then buried her head under the blankets to issue a muffled response. “No WAY. The monster had popcorn feet. NO WAY am I going back to my bed.”

Related posts:

“Mom, your Dexcom is making noise,” my daughter says casually, as we’re kicking the soccer ball around in the basement (because we’ll never, ever go outside again because snow).

“It is. Hang on a second,” I told her. A click shows that my blood sugar is over my high threshold, with a few yellow dots taking up residence on my graph. I’m not totally worried, though, because a check of my pump reveals some insulin still on board. I decide to let things play out and see where I land a bit later.

“I’m fine, kiddo. Let’s keep playing.”

The Dexcom has been part of my daughter’s life for as long as she can remember. When she was very small and figuring out her letters for the first time, I remember her running a tiny fingertip along the bottom of my receiver – “D-E-X-C-O-M spells … whaasat spell, Mama?”

“Dexcom. That’s the name of the machine.”

(Unlike most kids, my daughter’s list of first words included “pump,” “Dexcom,” and “diabeedles.” Maybe she’ll grow up to be a doctor? At the very least, this knowledge base has given her a leg-up on winning a few topic-specific spelling bees.)

As Birdy grew older, she started to understand some of the information that different diabetes devices provided. We’ve talked a little bit about how three digit numbers on my glucose meter that begin with “2” most often require me to take some insulin from my pump (same goes for the ones that begin with “3,” only those also come with some curse words), and how when the Dexcom makes an alarm sound, I need to check it and take some action.

“But that alarm – the BEEEEP … BEEEEP… BEEEEP! one – is one we can ignore, right Mom?”

“Ignore?”

“Yeah. When it goes BEEEEP … BEEEEP… BEEEEP, you don’t always look at it. But when it goes like this,” she raises her hands up in front of herself, like she’s sneaking up on something, “BeepBeepBeep really fast, then you look right away and get some glucose tabs.”

Funny how much she notices, how much of my diabetes self-care ritual has become a natural part of our time together.

“Kind of. The long beeps mean my blood sugar might be higher, but it’s not an emergency. The short beeps mean I have low blood sugar, and I need to get something to eat so it doesn’t become a big deal. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah.”

The sounds of the low and high alarms ringing out from my Dexcom receiver have become familiar, like a subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) soundtrack for my diabetes life, but I didn’t realize until recently that they are also sounds that remind my daughter of her mother.

The other morning, I heard Birdy walking into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and she was humming a little tune to herself, one that I recognized.

“Hey you. Are you singing a song?”

“Yeah. It’s the Dexcom beep song. It’s a good tune.” She grinned at me, toothbrush hanging out of her mouth.

Related posts:

Wild Kratts have invaded my house in a big way. It’s okay, because Birdy loves watching them and she learns all this random stuff about animals. (“MOM! The lion’s mane is the same color as the savannah grass,” yelled from her car seat as we’re driving. So I’m learning too, apparently.) She dons her version of a creature power suit and goes leaping all over the basement, pretending to be a lemur or some other critter.

“MOM!! He has a Dexcom!!” she said one morning.

“What’s that?” I asked her, coming over and sitting next to her while she’s watching television.

“Look!” and she points to the screen.

Sure enough, the wrist communicator that the Wild Kratts use to talk to their team back at the Tortuga looks almost exactly like my Dexcom receiver. (Please forgive me, because that whole sentence made complete and absolute sense to me.) See for yourself:

HON Code

DISCLAIMER:

I am not a doctor. I am not a certified diabetes educator. I have no medical degree. Nothing on this site should be taken as medical advice, and if you are taking it as medical advice, I suggest you contact your doctor immediately for issues other than diabetes.

This is my diabetes life - if you are interested in making changes to yours, you need to consult your doctor.

If you email me, your personal information will not be shared without your permission and your email address will not be sold to any company or entity.